Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Freya found a woman who looked official. The woman was just shaking her head and muttering, shaking and muttering and waving her papers like papers could help, but as she looked up something jumped in her eyes and she threw her arms around Freya. Freya had never been hugged this way before, with so much warmth and so much need. She felt in fact that up until now she had only ever been held by the edges of who she was. She also felt trapped. She kissed the woman on the nose, fully no idea why, and the woman let go and Freya was free. Ran for it. Tripped over rubble. There were sorry flickers of orange in the air. She tried again to get into the hotel.

‘Get back !’

Another long shining line of fire engines leaning into the bends of the road. A barbecue smell and wafts of something toxic. Rubble coming down in groups of two and three, ice cubes from a tray. The sight of a man in flip-flops, vomiting. A vigilant old woman, silver hair shooting forward from the crown, poking at a camera lens with her rubber-tipped stick. Dust and a dozen people coughing. A fireman saying, ‘Get back. Get back.’

An old man approached her. ‘Might you perhaps help me find my wife?’

‘I —’

‘Please? We’ve been married thirty years.’

A woman said, ‘God. Skipper! Did you see my dog? Skipper!’

‘I’m sorry,’ the old man said.

‘Are you sure? Skipper! He’s a dachshund. Skipper!’

‘Sorry,’ Freya said.

‘Skipper! Skip!’

‘I’m very sorry,’ the man said. ‘I’m looking for my wife. We’ve been married thirty years.’

‘Skip!’ the woman called. ‘Skipper! Skip!’

Surfer John found her. He was covered head to foot in filth. She told him she was completely done with hugs. He said, ‘You’re in shock.’ She said, ‘Irrespective.’ She said, ‘You’ve got to help me find my dad.’ He stood there looking dumb and kind, not quite a lemon but a definite citrus.

Groups were forming. A minister and his wife were pacing the pavement, the wife wearing a necklace of unaffected pearls. A bathrobe, a pair of slippers. She was saying, ‘I will not be flapped.’ Someone else said, ‘The Lady is secure, the Lady is secure.’ A tiny cheer rose up into the neutral night sky. Two dozen people in nightclothes. Firemen shouting ‘back back back’. Felt like every emergency vehicle in the United Kingdom was here now. Ladders extending up from fire engines. Men in huge clothing climbing onto balconies, vanishing into the building. Who would do this? Where was her dad?

John Redwood from the thingy unit, the Policy Unit, bottom right corner of Moose’s ‘Briefing Bios’ document; John Redwood pacing around saying, ‘After all that, I’ve left the bloody speech in there!’ Another guy saying, ‘We need to cut the Kinnock stuff. Where’s Ronnie um? We need to yes recast in case of —’ People seemed to fall into two camps, the panicked and the merely inconvenienced. Another dinosaur rumble from the building. ‘Back, back, get back .’

A fireman came out carrying a box of teacups, set it down on the ground and ran back in. A paramedic said, ‘Water from the hose. Eyebaths.’ People staggering blind, rubbing at their eyes, she saw them now, saw them quietly forming a queue. She was so grateful for this minor demonstration of order. She wiped the tears from her eyes.

Sir Keith Joseph was wearing silk pyjamas and a fine patterned dressing gown. He looked miraculously clean sitting there on a red box of government papers. He was humming and rocking very slightly from side to side.

‘Have you seen Daniel, is he staying here?’

‘Have you seen Amy, was she staying here?’

‘There’s coffee and wine in the Metropole, bar opened, Blitz spirit.’

‘Metropole evacuated, another bomb.’

‘Get her back to Downing Street.’

‘There’s no other bomb.’

‘She won’t go.’

‘Fuck’s sake.’

‘Skipper!’

‘Police stations.’

‘She’s safe.’

‘Have you seen my wife?’

‘Second device.’

‘Hospital.’

‘What to do?’

‘We’ve been married thirty years.’

No one wanted to help her find her dad. Surfer John talked to the policemen. They wanted names of staff, a floor plan.

A cat ran across the road in several smooth leaps, ears pinned back, body lengthening and lowering as it crept under a car — Barbara. Her tail disappearing, only the yellow eyes aglow.

Glass shattered.

‘Get back!’

Voices and torches, dust, luminous jackets, yellow tape, bathrobes, dust, police, cameras, lights, dust. A helicopter had begun to hover in the sky.

Dan’s mother had been taken in by Mrs Whelan: cocoa and a bath. When he walked into the living room he found her sitting on the sofa. Books on the shelves had been arranged according to their colours, yellows blending into greens, the Whelans’ OCD thing. Outside, smoke still poured from his home.

He stood in front of her. ‘Ma,’ he said. She complained and leaned to the left. The TV was in the corner, murmuring in black and white. She said she was trying to watch it.

He sat beside her and turned the volume up. Minutes and minutes of pointless shite before the newscaster said Mrs Thatcher had survived. The news emptied Dan’s head. He felt only relief. He would fall into history’s footnotes, become one of its unseen failures. The newscaster’s next revelation: Alistair McAlpine was talking to Marks & Spencer about opening early, to sell clean clothes to those ‘affected’. Cut to Thatcher saying the conference would go ahead as planned, no delay to the speeches. Cut to a picture of Marks & Spencer. Marks & Spencer! A great British success story was piecing itself together. A nausea began to swell in his stomach. Cut to the Grand Hotel still standing, a chunk torn out. Cut to a doctor standing outside the Royal Sussex hospital, curly grey hair. He said the number of dead could not yet be ascertained, the rescue operation continues, so do the efforts to treat the wounded. The word ‘wounded’ crawled inside Dan. The word ‘dead’ did nothing. He turned the sound down, looked around the room. Through the window the sky was such a smooth black that it seemed a thing he ought to be able to feel, a blackboard or a piece of slate.

He tried to put his arm around his mother. She moved away. Did not even lift her chin from her hands. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

His mother shook her head. Three or four women who’d been in the kitchen came into the living room now. One said, with undisguised excitement in her voice, ‘She’s lost everything, Dan. Give her time.’

He stood and said no. ‘Half the building’s being saved.’

‘What?’ his mother said.

‘Ma, there’s no fresh fire out there now, only smoke. We can rebuild.’

‘Come on, Dan.’

‘We can. Some of the belongings, Dad’s things, they’ll be salvageable. And Jones’s home is mostly OK. Don’t mistake me, these people will pay.’

She shook her head and pinched the skin of her forearm. ‘These people,’ she said.

‘We could have lost more, I’m saying.’

She laughed again. ‘Who are you talking about, Dan? Who is it you’re calling “these people”? These people are the only people here.’

He began to explain. She shook her head, did not want to learn. His skin still tingled from all the ash that had fallen upon him. His clothes stank of smoke.

‘Some things,’ he said. ‘Some of it we’ll get cleaned up and will be fine. We’ll hold on to some of it, we will. Things aren’t as bad as you think, Ma.’

Slack skin, liver spots, eyes greyer than before. She seemed to have aged ten years in the last two hours. The other women in the room were whispering. She said, ‘Things aren’t as bad as you think, Dan? True. Things are worse than you think. Being general, they’re much, much worse.’